It’s been said that opposites attract. Failing that, it would benefit sign business owners if opposites could at least co-exist, communicate and be productive. Alas, this is the everyday challenge facing sales people and production workers.
Would it not be wonderful to market a product in such high demand that you’d have no need to employ company evangelists to beat the bushes in search of interested customers willing to pay premium prices? Likewise, wouldn’t life be grand if there was an endless supply of ready-made, off-the-shelf products that needed absolutely no customization to satisfy your clients’ particular and unique needs? Of course, neither of these are the case in our industry.
So what is the climate of the relationship between your sales team—inside sales, order entry and customer service, along with the outside road warriors—and those highly talented individuals charged with the responsibility to produce, assemble and ship the orders that come in? I’ve seen businesses where the two groups weren’t even singing from the same hymnal, let alone the same page.
Maybe your circumstances are not that dire, but what sign shop operation couldn’t benefit from a better working relationship between sales and production? Allow me to offer some simple advice on how to improve throughput, reduce waste, create customer delight and spark esprit de corps among your troops.

ALL THAT’S LEFT, RIGHT?
I find it ironic that at the same time computers were being pioneered—in the 1960s—significant advances in understanding how the human brain works were also being made. It was the Nobel Prize-winning discovery by California Institute of Technology’s Roger Sperry and Robert Ornstein that there are two sides of the brain, rather than just one big blob.

What’s this got to do with the relationship between sales and production? Quite a lot, actually. Sperry and Ornstein found that, in most people, the left side of the brain deals with logic, reasoning, numbers, sequence and detailed analysis—desirable behavioral traits found in the best sign shop operators. While the left cortex engages in these kinds of activities, the right side deals with functions such as spontaneity, imagination, color, creativity and Gestalt thinking (awareness of the bigger picture). The right-brain type tasks are critical skills of the consummate sales professional. (Why do you think so many talented sales people despise completing paperwork and taking time to read and follow directions?)
Sales and production professionals are vastly different animals. In no way is one better than the other. They are simply different. If there was a 12-step program to get these two to work together effectively, step one would be to have each appreciate and celebrate their individual strengths, along with the strengths of the other.
One last point about Sperry and Ornstein’s research: They also showed that, when one is encouraged to develop a mental area they recognize to be weak, the development effort, rather than detracting from other areas, seems to result in a synergy in which all areas of mental performance improves.

Regardless if you are predominantly left-brained or right-brained, there are many exercises you can do to develop the other side and, as a result, gain a deeper understanding of your counterpart in order to work more efficiently in the future. Try this quick little exercise for fun. Place yourself in a quiet, comfortable room, free from interruption. Close your eyes and imagine your favorite person, place or thing. Study its every detail for a moment. With that image clearly registered in your mind’s eye, perform the following activities, one at a time, in order:

• Without moving your head, rotate it in front of you.
• View it from above.
• View it from underneath.
• Change its color at least three times.
• Make it gigantic in relation to its surroundings.
• Make it tiny.
• Make it disappear.
• Bring it back.

Makes you think of greater possibilities, doesn’t it?

COMMUNICATION IS KEY
I realize that, if you are a one-person shop, you probably don’t have many conflicts between sales and production—unless, at a particular point in time, you find it difficult to focus on a left-brain function when you are in your right mind, and vice versa. Perhaps the solution lies in the communication between the two sides. And so it is in a larger organization.
Much as you may perform a business review involving your company and a valued client to discuss the condition of your relationship, raise the suggestion of also holding a performance review with your sales and production departments. You should remain neutral and act only as facilitator, sponsor and benefactor with a vested interest.

For the agenda of the meeting, use the four continuous-improvement questions:

• Where are we now?
• Where do we want to be a year (a quarter, six months) from now?
• How are we going to get there?
• How will we measure progress along the way?

As business owner, it’s your responsibility to establish some ground rules, set the precedent that this is not just a whimsical notion on your part—that you have high expectations for what may come out of the review—and create an open-minded climate for productive dialogue. Don’t allow the meeting to become a gripe-session, but allow for some difference of opinion, approach and/or style.
Solicit ideas for the review’s agenda well in advance. Word the agenda topics in the broadest possible way so as to not incite prejudicial thought or foregone conclusion. Encourage the groups to seek their own solutions rather than only looking to you for ideas. You may make some suggestions from time to time, but your purpose in raising them should be to get the group off dead-center or to illustrate that you are empowering them to take ownership in the decisions they make.
Encourage them to make decisions by consensus rather than by majority rule, horse-trading, compromise or concession. At the end of the day, every member of the meeting should be able to live with and actively support the action plan for improvement that is developed.

WALK A MILE IN MY SHOES
In my corporate life, I’ve had the pleasure of working with and for some pretty innovative people. When it came to understanding the delicate relationship between sales and production, each had to become a student of human behavior and practitioner of organizational leadership. You may want to try—or modify to fit your situation—some of their more creative initiatives:

Promote the practice of working in another department for a day once in a while. Outside sales people ought to know how to design a sign using your company’s software, set up and operate a plotter, produce a cut-vinyl banner from scratch, take and enter a phone order, and answer incoming phone calls to technical or customer service. Likewise, from time to time, production and office workers should spend a day with sales reps pressing the flesh and coming face-to-face with customers and their problems. I’m not suggesting going overboard with this, but it serves one well to have to perform or observe the daily tasks of another team member and appreciate their work.

Using a modest degree of technology, establish a computerized bulletin board that posts the real-time status of job orders. At the click of a mouse or with a phone call into an automated attendant, anyone should be able to ascertain when a particular job is scheduled to be run, who is the leader on the project, and/or where it is in the production process—percentage completed, projected completion date/time, a reason for a job being suspended, and such—and when it is expected to ship.

Establish an employee-orientation program that includes every new worker experiencing life as “customer for a day.” They get to place an order through a sales associate, track that job through the production process, and take receipt of it as a “welcome aboard” gift—something like their parking space sign or magnetic vehicle sign. Many orientation programs assign new employees a sponsor or mentor on day one—and, often, that person is not their immediate supervisor. It’s just someone that the newbie can bounce questions off, confide in, or seek periodic approval from. Such programs have a reputation of lengthening the average amount of time most workers stay with the company, improving productivity and building employee morale and loyalty.

Allow on-the-road sales reps to make up to one phone call per day into a designated point of contact in production to ask questions or obtain key information. The sales person starts to ask questions like, “I am ready to ask for this large order. Are there any special or unusual circumstances (for example, a shortage of or unavailability of a key component or a critical piece of equipment that is down) that would slow down production on this job?” or, “When would be the absolutely earliest date this job will be completed and when should I tell the customer it will be ready?”

Likewise, and only with prior agreement, give the lead production person the name and phone number for the contact at the customer in case there are questions with the order or unexpected problems. Although many sales people dislike this idea and prefer to have the production person contact them directly so they can, in turn, control what and how information is conveyed to the client, when a production crewmember and a sales rep have a great working relationship, a lot of time can be saved and the image of the company is enhanced when customers realize there are more folks than just the sales person working on their behalf.

Good luck…